Yes, it’s gone from “awesome” to “amazing”. Deal with it.

Lately I have been thinking about what an amazing and extraordinary person I am. And for once, not in a begrudging and dismissive “well, I suppose, given the evidence, some people might conclude that I possess some amazing-like properties” way.

In a true blue “it’s actually pretty awesome to be me” way!

It started from the way I interact with my fellow furries online in a text environment called Tapestries. I was signing off recently when it suddenly hit me : compared to all the other fuzzies there, I am an amazing phenomenon.

Not to put them down. They are fine. But I haven’t met anyone who is as dynamic, sweet, funny. outrageous, adorable, sexy, and downright entertaining as me.

I light up whatever room I am in. I bring the party wherever I go just by being myh scintillating. sparkling. amazing self.

And that’s like. no small thing. Most people do not have that. It’s extraordinary.

It’s just taken me a long time and a lot of recovery to get to the point where I can appreciate myself as the all star amazing fellow I am.

Snagglepuss : And in a social context, even!

Admittedly, it’s the safe social context of a world where I am my words and in that sense I have total control. but it’s still pretty amazing.

And the truth is, I could totally be that way in the real world,. too.

Think about it. As Fruvous, I am bold, outrageous, charming, forward, cute, sexy, and beloved by nearly all who meet me.

I tend to piss off cranky people. but that’s no loss. It just ends up with them looking like the joy and fun hating villain from an 80’s cartoon.

And the thing is, I could totally be like that in the real world. All it would take is some courage and a certain kamikaze fatalism that detaches me from outcomes and instead says “whatever happens, I gotta be me. ”

That’s a wisdom I would have laughed at until recently. Obviously the right thing to do is whatever produces the best outcome. What more could there be?

Byt it turns out that utilitarianism doesn’t work that great on a personal level. I now think that the best life strategy is – and brace yourself, because this is some mindblowing wisdom you have never heard before – is to be true to yourself and you can’t go wrong.

Wow, what a radical thought that the entire culture has been screaming at me for as long as I can remember. I guess I just never “got it” before. I was too busy being excessively reductivist and obnoxiously logical and myopically self-referential about every little thing.

To those of similar inclination : remember my motto – there is a lot more to life than what makes sense. Ditch the logic and ask yourself how you feel about the world. Watch a sunrise. Think about kittens. Give someone you love a hug. Open yourself to the large doses of positive emotions available in the world and don’t sweat what they mean or how they fit into the big picture or what, in balance, it says about society.

Just open up and soak it in. Let yourself feel good.

Because, like…. why not? Why not feel good?

Isn’t that what all intelligent organisms want to do?

In life, we logical types end up building enormous and elaborate defeneses against our own emotions out of a highly misguided desire to stay “in control”. These defenses end up strangling us and depriving us of the very important emotional nutrients we need in order to be happy human beings.

Well fuck that. We think we know better than our emotions but we don’t. The human mind actually works extremely well without that kind of interference and all the fiddling and reacting and constructing and justification does is get in the way of the mind’s excellent abilities to heal itself.

So the idea is to get out of the way. Simplify. Downgrade. Try to remember what life was like when you were a child on a summer day with no obligations other than to please yourself. Don’t worry that someone relaxing and thinking like a child for a while will somehow cause all your intellectual progresss since then to collapse and never return and suddenly you won’t be smart any more.

Relax. That shit’s hardware. It will boot back up when you want it to.

Back then, you dealt with the world on an emotional level, without filters. you felt things strongly and with your entire being. You weren’t jaded or cynical or wary yet. Your heart was open and you were happy.

But then life happened. Bad things happened. And you wanted to make sure they didn’t happen again. And it was here that you made a fateful choice : you decided that the problem was emotions.

Emotions were the enemy, and old cold precise intellectual reasoning could save you from them. Emotions made you do the things that led to the pain, and that meant the only solution was to clamp down hard on your emotions and take refuge in the cool crisp air of intellectualism and never let your emotions “get ahead of you” again.

And it made you feel safe. It detached you from your emotions and let you escape the negative ones and that was worth whatever price you had to pay.

But it was a huge mistake. Emotions were never the problem, and blaming them was like eating a bad peanut and declaring war on food. Emotions are life. They are the only reason we do anything. Logic and reason are powerful tools, but that’s all they are. Tools. They can’t give you the love and hope and acceptance you need. They can’t replace all the good things to feel in life. They can’t get you through times when the world seems very dark and you want to give up.

Only emotion can do that, and only if you LET IT IN.

Wow, what an extraordinary and inspiring speech!

Told ya I was amazing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling a lot better today. Still feeling pretty messed up physically, but at least my mood has improved, and that’s a good thing.

Physically, I feel extremely sluggish. Like part of me is trying to hibernate. I feel like I could sleep for a week. Any part of me that gets more than a tiny bit of pressure starts to fall asleep all on its own, and I feel like following it.

but my mood is good. I feel fairly content. It’s the happy kind of sleepy, where I feel languid and relaxed and pleasantly lazy. Things don’t seem as bad to me today as they did yesterday. I don’t feel as tense about things.

In fact, I am dangerously close to a ‘thing will unfold as they should’ kind of mood, and that’s pretty rare for me.

But enough of that. Here’s the update :

Last night, after having my card decline when trying to pay for my Denny’s, I checked my balance online and quickly discovered the reason : there was only $3.13 there!

Gasp! That was quite the shock, as to my mind there should have been around $90 there. Had I been cyber-robbed?

Technically no. My Amazon Prime had auto-renewed, and whaddaya know, that costs around $88 a year.

Totally worth it, IMHO. Next day shipping on damn near everything?

And apparently you get, like movies and shit too!

I just can’t afford it right now.

And this was the moment of destiny, because I could either have gotten super depressed and then closed the tab and buried myself in my distractions to escape it and thus tacitly accepted my fate, OR I could spring into action to fix the situation.

And hooray, I bucked the current trend and sprang into action. Maybe the fact that it was about my money that gave me the motivation – I don’t know.

I got on the Amazon.ca website, dug up their online chat help type thingy, and asked very nicely for them to cancel my Prime and refund me. And they did!

Well, technically, they are going to. There’s a whole “this transaction will (mysteriously) take three to five days” nonsense that we still have to put up with for some reason.

I mean seriously, WTF is up with that?

But the point is that I got it done. I didn’t passively suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I by opposing ended them!

If I hadn’t been in the middle of a five week month and thus quite in need of cash reserves, I might have let it slide. That’s how I ended up having Prime for a year in the first place. I had signed up for the free trial month and, of course, then totally forgotten about it and the trial period elapsed without me canceling, and as per out agreement, boom, I bought me some Prime.

Presumably, in the August of 2017, I was not feeling so financially stressed, so I said fuck it and let it slide.

But this is 2018 and so that shit had to be fixed. Still, should I become more prosperous, I will totally get Prime again.

I mean, that shit’s addictive.

And then, this afternoon, I actually managed to get my GP’s office on the phone and made an appointment for Wednesday at 2:30. Thus, my medication crisis is over an I will soon be back to full compliance.

I’m going to have a talk with them about why nobody answered the phone for two weeks, but whatever. Problem solved.

And now I feel a lot better. Two problems solved instead of ignored. Good for me!

Now the question is : was I able to get those things done because I felt better, or do I feel better because I got those things done?

Probably a little of both, but mostly the latter. The financial crisis nature of my Amazon problem gave me the impetus to take action on it, and that opened the door to my giving my doctor’s office another try, and that led to my feeling a lot better because my worries about not having all my meds had been relieved.

Next up : figuring out WTF is up with my 711 rewards card, then taking another try at getting my taxes done so I can start getting GST checks again.

There should be two of them in the system somewhere right now, the one from April and the one from July. That, plus the standard $75 the government gives us poor folks to bribe us into doing out taxes should add up to somewhere between $200-$300.

Which will be nice. Not nice enough to get what I really want, but still, nice.

What I really want is to visit home. I want to go back to good ol Summerside Prince Edward Island for a little while.

My mother is in her 70s now and so I don’t know how much longer she will be around and I absolutely must get to see her before she passes. I love her so much.

And I have this image in my mind – I think I may have described it in this spot before. The image is of me as a child crying out to my mother, who is walking away from me. And what I am saying is “No! Don’t go! Don’t leave without me!”.

Very powerful stuff, given my lifelong fear of being left behind and that this is my mother we are talking about. It terrifies me.

But on another level, I am thinking about how good it is that there are still some things powerful enough to penetrate my inner chill so that I can feel something.

I have talked before how when you are numb, feeling absolutely anything can be a joy, even if it is painful. The body knows what it supposed to be there and aches for the stimulus that is missing.

And that’s truly of the mind as well. That’s what makes isolation so painful. It’s not merely a lack of an expected pleasure, namely the pleasure of socialization.

It’s that deep dark feeling of wrongness that screams silently for what it knows should be there in the minds of depressives and all other amputees.

Some day, I will break that chill around my heart for good.

But for now, I am just glad that there are some things that provoke an emotional reaction strong enough to make it through.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a Spoonerism.

So yeah. As covered in yestereday’s blog entry, I’ve been pretty depressed lately. I keep getting th urge to just stay in bed and sleep as much as I possible can in order to avoid having to deal with reality altogether.

Like I always say, sleep is like death without the commitment.

And I feel so damned small. Like I am a tiny mouse trying to face a world that is far too big, scary, dangerous, and loud for him so he just stays in his mousehole alone.

There’s a children’s book in there somewhere. Something that has a positive message and a cheerful tone but is also kind of depressing.

You know. For the sad kids.

When I even contemplate turning to face reality even slightly, I shrink away from it like I am a mimosa plant.

My theory is that they named the breakfast cocktail the Mimosa because that’s how most people feel in the morning.

And with the smallness and the shrinking away comes the coldness. The terrible, life-destroying coldness that brings the layers on layers of frostbite that turns the surface of my soul into raw, pockmarked  hamburger meat.

And the flesh underneat isn’t doing much better, either. Especially my poor heart, scarped raw by glaciers and pierced to death by a million icicles.

And all because of an over-active parasympathic system. It’s supposed to balance out the sympathetic system, aka the adrenaline response system. Something produces an adrenaline response, like fear or joy or sex or anger, and the whole adrenal response system kicks in. Adrenaline floods into the system, blood vessels dilate,  the liver dumps whatever sugar it’s got on hand into the bloodstream, and basically everything mans its respective battle station.

Then once the situation is resolved, the parasympathetic system is supposed to scrub the adrenaline out of the bloodstream and put everything back to normal.

The parasympathetic system is also responsible for other situations in which calming and a reduction in sensitivity is required. The specific response I am talking about is the one that produces pain-dampening chemicals in the brain.

As patient readers know, I think that depression stems from psychological trauama too severe for the mind to heal on its own causing the pain-dampening switch to get stuck in the on position and thus leaving the patient constantly awash in numbing chemicals that make it impossible to feel damned near anything that would produce an adrenal response, even the good stuff.

Worst of all, it numbsI feel d loneliness.

That’s very bad for a member of a social species like humanity.

And the fact that I phrase things that way – that I express the pain of depression’s isolation in such clinical language – is a pretty good indicator that I onbe of of these patients and that one of the only ways I know to relate to the world is through the language of scientific analysis.

I am always more comfortable analyzing than emoting.

So where was I? Feeling small, shrinking away from everything, wanting to stay in bed and sleep all the time and not deal with reality at all, the terrible cold fear that keeps me from living my life, feeling frostbitten and fucked up and raw.

And how do I get out of this negative state into a happier one? Fucked if I know. Maybe I just can’t get there from here. Maybe I am helpless before the oscillations and vacillations of my turbulent brain chemicals and all I can do is hang in there and hope for the occasional reprieve for my torment to emerge from the chaos.

It would be nice to be free of pain. Even for a little while.

I feel so lost sometimes.

It’s a hard feeling to describe. It’s not just a feeling that I have no idea where I am, although that’s bad enough. It’s also a feeling of having no idea where to go and not even the slithest feeling that there is a way to figure it out.

It’s a feeling of being as lost as lost can be. Total disorientation. I feel like I am lost in an infinite landscape of mirrors, halls, doors, symbols, arrows, flashing lights, smoke, pains, tortures, and booby traps.

In such a mess, is it any wonder that I end up sitting down and doing nothing? At least when I am stationary, I am not bumping into anything or setting anything off or otherwise making things worse just for daring to move.

It’s a wonder I can do anything at al. I must have some way of making it through the Maze that does not rely on the usual sort of sight.

I assume it’s the Force.

Okay, maybe not. REal answer : I assume I make my way through life via insight instead of the usual kind of sight. Because as far as I can remember, I’ve always had this layer of internal chaos in my tempetuous mind. I have to overcome, via sheer grit and wit and all that shit, a large wall of tumult and chaos just to get my eyes to focus properly, let alone interface with reality competently.

But try explaining that to a doctor. I would never be able to get the idea across. I can’ even explain much simpler things in a way that doctors understand. They are listening for certain key words and if they don’t hear them, they look at you like you just came in and spoke to them with great passion and engagement in the language of the Kalahari Bushmen, the one with all the clicks.

So every day and in every way,  I fight battles nobody else could even comprehend, let alone help with. Bttles I can’t explain in ways people will understand. Battles that are totally invisible to the world outside my skull.

Battles that sometimes take everything i have got to win and have nothing left for coping with anything real at all, so all I can do is muddle through my day in the most minimal way I know and hope tomorrow I get to actually do something.

But with how things are going lately, I ain’t holding my breath.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And what do you know, here it is, 7:53 pm, and I feel liked used shit again.

I am truly a wretched, horrid thing. Or at least I feel like one. Right now it feels like I have two bowling balls in my stomach and even the slightest of motions makes them click together or grind against one another.

That’s probably due to having eaten too much heavily margarined rice earlier. I did a full batch of rice in the rice cooker for supper yesterday – which, sadly enough, was a big achievement for me – and today I tried to recreate one of my favrote dirt-poor meals of buttered curried rice and I do believe I ate way too much of it.

Plus I added a ton of curry and still could barely taste it. Is it possible for curry to lose its zing over time? Because I highly doubt it’s that I have suddenly developed an iron palate that feels no heat.

IT might seem odd to eat one’s rice buttered, but I assured you, it is delicious, inexpensive, and surprisingly satisfying. It fills you up in a way that plain rice or rice with soya sauce does not.

And that’s a big deal if you are dirt poor. And I have been that poor. So poor that I had to buy and cook according to whatever got me the most meals for my money and to hell with thoughts like nutrition.

And you know what’s cheap? Carbs.

Speaking of nutrition, so far, my supper consists of one banana. Being a veteran when it comes to eating against my appetite, I know that now it is just a matter of waiting until my stomach settles after the banana and starts to wake up and get moving before I will feel like maybe eating something else.

An apple, maybe. Or some mandarin oranges. I guess fruit has a high appeal factor to me when I am in this state. Nice, lovely, delicious fruit, cold from the fridge, packed with flavour and nutrition and that particular kind of wet cellulose that seems to calm my stomach down, presumable by giving it something to work on.

I realized earlier that I have been pretty depressed lately. It’s not always easy for me to tell because I am so good at keeping myself distracted and bare-minimum content that I can easily fool myself into thinking everything is okay.

But it’s not okay. I feel terrible. My sleep is even more busted up than usual. I feel turgid, trapped, and tense. I feel like something inside of me is trying to get out but something’s blocking it but good, and the pain of straining against the blockage to no effect is really starting to wear me down.

But more than the physical symptoms telling me of my internal turmoil, I have realized that I have not been resisting that deep down dirty fear that lies at the core of my depression at all lately.

It’s had its way on nearly everything. I simply have lacked the wherewithal to push against it. I have been a prisoner of its gravity and it’s time I took a good look at it and why that might be.

because I don’t know what makes it so that sometimes I can resist the crushing effects of my depression and other times the best that I can hope for is to maintain the status quo and live through another day of arctic chill trying to kill my soul.

My gut tells me that it is some aspect of my physical health that determines this. And when I think about it, I am shockingly ignorant of what is going on in my body and why. Like most modern humans, I eat what I eat and live how I live and act as though how I feel as a result is some mystically complex and random phenomenon beyond my control like the weather.

If I could master my physical health, it would go a very long way to making my psychological health improve as well. And yet I spend all this time every day with my head stuck up my navel trying to work the system the other way around.

Well it doesn’t work like that. no amount of psychological insight and growth is going to overcome physical depression. You’re a physical being first, after all, despite what the transcendentalist hordes will tell you. Take care of the body and to a certain extent the mind will take care of itself.

A pretty speech – I am good at those – but what could I actually change? It’s one thing to talk about the generalities of the subject but the truth is that I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do to improve my feeling of physical health.

Well, besides exercise, but that’s a whole thing.

Exercise would undoubtedly lead to my feeling like a zillion times better. For one, it would get my sweat flowing and thus unclog my pores and let my skin breathe a lot better. And I would dissipate all that excess energy kicking around my system that fuels my neurotic self-destruction because it has nowhere else to go. And over time I would lose weight and have more energy and feel a lot better about life.

And so forth and so on. The arguments for exercise are logical, sensible, and conclusive, just like the arguments for the semi-infinite number of other things that I “should’ be doing and totally “could” be doing.

But none of that matters when the chill sets in at the merest thought of doing things and robs me of all my motivation and makes me feel all dead inside.

Dead. But still in pain. How ironic. How cruel.

Still, perhaps I could persuade myself to get some in-apartment exercise at least. Think of it as a hobby, or a game, or just a way to make myself feel good.

Or even just as something to DO, god damn it, besides playing ESO all day.

It’s so hard to give up the bad pleasure you’re addicted to in favour of the good one that can’t help but pale in comparison because you are not fixated on it.

Here’s hoping it is worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is really not fair that I feel this bad at 7:18 pm.

I mean, I thought we had a deal, the universe and I. I felt shitty around lunch time, which is around when I woke up, but through napping and waking in 2 hour up/ 1 hours down shifts, by the time supper and blogging time comes around at around 7 pm, I am feeling fairly human again and I can cope with the whole making the words be on the page where people can read them….. thing.

But no, here I am, at the usual time, and I feel like I just crawled out of a peat bog where my remains had remained strikingly well preserved until global warming disturbed my ancient grave and sent me to the surface world in search of blood….

…sugar. Blood sugars. In search of food so that my blood sugar level stays above the fucking hyperphagic line and I am not driven mad by that Demon Hunger bastard.

For you see, I am once more out of Glyburide, which is one of my diabetes meds. I had plenty of time – ten days – to either finally get in touch with my GP or go to my pharmacy and ask for an emergency supply or get myself a new GP and get THEM to write me a ‘scrip for more, but of course, I just played ESO all the time.

An inability to cope with reality is truly a crippling disease, and leads to all kinds of nasty side effects, especially if you are not the kind of sick that qualifies you for a caregiver.

It means that if you can’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done. Period. Especially when part of your inability to cope includes having a lot of trouble asking for help.

And that’s sad, you know? That some people just can’t be helped. There must be thousands of people like me out there who can’t adult yet don’t qualify for any kind of assistance in adulting because they are not sick enough or in the right ways.

Truth be told, that’s not even the real issue, though. For all I know, I might qualify for all kinds of help. But it doesn’t matter, because I will never ask for it.

In fact, it would be very hard for me to get myself to a place where I could believe said help existed AND that I deserved it AND had the motivation to actually jump through all the hoops involved, ALL at the same time.

Even the thought of just having someone who checks in on me now and then to make sure I am taking care of myself fills me with enormous humiliation and shame.

I would feel so pathetic for even asking for, let alone getting that kind of help. It would be such a confirmation of what a wretched and worthless person than I am. And how dare I ask for help when literally everyone else in the world deserves more than I?

Of course, that’s not how I would feel about someone else getting that kind of help. But that’s different, they deserve it, and how dare you judge them for getting the help they need, and so forth and so on.

But that’s the problem with having such a damaged self-worth. The water is poisoned at the source. The corruption flows from within. The call is coming from inside the house.

So there is you, and everyone else, and the rulebooks for them are wildly different and not consistent with one another at all.

Now where was I. Oh right, diabetes.

Actually, my abortive search for a new GP is a good example of how my inability to cope plays out. Because it took six of those ten days just to work up the energy to actually go to the website of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC and look up what GPs there were in my area.

And then I got the momentum knocked out of my by a problem I had totally forgotten about since the last time I was on the hunt for a new GP. namely that every doctor in my area is Chinese and therefore I have no way of know how good their English is before I make my choice.

And yeah, the fact that a Chinese name for a doctor makes me worry about their English skills is probably a little racist.

But I am protecting my own health here, because I know that if there is a language barrier between me and my GP, I will not be able to handle it.

If they don’t understand what I am saying and/or I can’t understand what they are saying I will have the mother of all panic attacks and it will be a total deal breaker.

So I looked at that list of Chinese names and blanched and said to myself “Well that’s as far as I can take that right now” and I haven’t dealt with the issue since.

So here I am, knowing that I will be contending with the goddamned Demon Hunger, a thing that can make me feel so hungry that my own flesh starts to seem tempting, all weekend because I can’t get my shit together enough to make a couple of phone calls and get the life saving meds I need.

And the fact that I know that it is all my fault and that this entire fiasco could easily have been avoided is just the crapulent cherry on the shit sundae that is my life. QED.

That would have been a great place to end the blog entry but I got like 50 words left.

So, in general, I have been feeling crappy today, although I feel a lot better for having spewed my bile in this blog entry.

Somehow, I need to negotiate some kind of compromise between my attempts to be more poisitive and open in my life and the therapeutic benefits of venting all my nasty negative nonsense into this handy dandy little blog of mine every day.

But that’s for another day. Right now, I am going to go flee reality via sleep.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Suddenly, Jaekob stopped.

“This is the place, Mother. ” he announced.

“Are you sure, Jaekob?” said Mother as she glanced at the surrounding woods. “This looks just like a dozen other places we’ve seen tonight.

Jaekob glared at her with surprisingly intensity for an eight year old.

“Right, right. ” said Mother. “You lead, I follow, no questions. That was the deal. ” She mimed zipping her lip. “I’ll be quiet. ”

“Good. ” said Jaekob. “Because he’ll be here soon. ”

And indeed, it seemed like it was only two and a half breaths before the enormous shaggy Wolf loped into the clearing.

The moment it saw Jaekob, it began to growl. And the growl was a terrible sound, deep and cruel, the kind of sound that raises the hair on the necks of even the most seasoned of hunters.

Jaekob smiled at it. “Hello my Wolf. Hello my beautiful boy. Hello my mighty hunter. Hello to you. ”

The Wolf advanced on Jaekob slowly, slavering fangs glistening in the moonlight. Jaekob took a few slow steps toward it.

“Jaekob!” said Mother. “What are you doing? That thing will eat you alive!”

“No he won’t. ” said Jaekob. “Will you, big fella? You don’t want to hurt anybody. You just want to be safe. Isn’t that right?”

Jaekob extended his hand toward the Wolf, palm down. The Wolf’s growling intensified, and slowly it crouched down. muscles tensing to pounce.

“Jaekob!” said Mother. “Get away from there! That monster is going to kill you!” She wanted to run and snatch her boy away from the predator, but to her great shame she was too scared to move.

Jaekob moved even closer to the Wolf, smiling, eyes full of love. “Look at his paw, Mother. ” he said.

Mother looked, and gasped. The creature’s right front paw was dripping blood from the teeth of a massive metal trap. The heavy drops of blood hissed slightly when they hit the snow. The edges of the wound were gnarled and dried.

“You see, Mother?” said Jaekob as he continued to move closer to the Wolf. “He’s not a monster, he’s just in pain.

The Wolf snarled and snapped its teeth an inch from Jaekob’s nose, causing Mother to cry out in anguish and move a step closer.

Jaekob didn’t even flinch.

“Oh no. Not this time. ” said Jaekob. “I know what you want. You want to chase me back to my home, just like you have done so many times before. But this time, I’m not going anywhere. You need me, and I am here for you. Now let’s see about getting that nasty thing off of you. ”

Jaekob knelt and took the injured paw, trap and all, into his little hands. The Wolf growled and whimpered from the pain but remained absolutely stock still.

Jaekob gently caressed the paw, and said “Such a cruel device. ” He ran his fingers very softly over the place where the teeth of the trap met the Wolf’s flesh, and tsked.

“I can remove this, old friend, but I will need your help. ” said Jaekob. “I need you to relax your paw as much as possible. Can you do that for me?”

The Wolf looked deep into Jaekob’s eyes, and found there only love and compassion and a genuine desire to help. So he nodded his great shaggy head, closed his eyes that were as big as a grown man’s palm, and tried to relax.

‘That’s it…. ” cooed Jaekob encouragingly. “Let go…. let go…. let go… and… AHA! ”

The Wolf opened its eyes in surprise and looked at its paw. And what do you know, the trap was gone! Jaekob had slipped it off and it now lay empty and broken nearby.

The Wolf was so astonished that it leapt to its feet, only to bark sharply in pain as it tried to put weight on its still mangled front paw and slide back down in shock.

Instantly, Jaekob was there, stroking that big shaggy head soothingly, and murmuring “It’s OK, it’s OK, big brother. It’s all going to be okay now. You are safe now and everything is going to be okay from now on. Nobody is going to hurt you any more. Nobody is going to hunt you any more. Nobody is going to try to stick you in a cage to make you behave any more. From now on, you can be a Wolf and I can be Jaekob and together we can be a team. Would you like that, old friend? Me and you as a team?”

Once more the Wolf looked deeply into Jaekob’s eyes, probing. And then the wolf nodded once, and woofed.

Jaekob beamed. “Good. Because I love you, big Wolf. I love you more than anything else in the world.”Jaekob drew that big shaggy head inot his lap, and stroked the Wolf’s ears. ” And I love all of you, from the tip of your tail to the sharp points of your fangs. I love you and accept you for all that you are, and I know I love you the same way.

The Wolf’s eyes drifted closed, and he nuzzled the boy’s tummy softly as his tail, big enough to knock over a telephone pole, began to slowly wag.

And the two of them stayed that way, warm and close, for a long time. Mother, being wise, saw the two together and knew that, despite what the fear in the pit of her stomach said, this was a good thing, and so she slipped quietly away, happier than she had bene in a very long time without knowing why.

And then, naturally as can be, the spell was broken, and Jaekob slid out from under the massive muzzle of his Wolf, and woke up the Wolf who wagged at his boy and gave the boy a massive slurp on the cheek, and then the two walked off into the big wide world together and had many wonderful adventures together, and no matter what happened, they never forgot that a boy is a boy, and a wolf is a wolf, and both are just fine how they are, thank you very much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I caught my depression and/or bad wiring in action today, and I figured it would write about it and thus catch it and put it in a jar (with airholes, natch) and then, of course, analyze the fuck out of it.

Look, you have your definition of fun, and I have mine. Mine just happens to include applying my vast and awe-inspiring powers of analysis to a new and interesting and potentially even fruitful topic.

I also really enjoy sorting things for some reason. I am not sure that fact is related but I decided to include it just in case.

Anyhow, fresh to my miscroscope today is the phenonemon from the title : scrunch and repress. That when an unpleasant or otherwise unweclome thoughts happens in my head and instead of dealing with it I just scrunch it down and push it into the background of my mind via my psychological oubliette.

Now it’s been more than a century since Freud, so the repression part of it is a well known phenomenon. And we all know it’s bad. We know that it is better to deal with things in the here and now and keep the amount we repress to an absolute minimum.

But we all do it any way because it’s the only way to cope.

More interesting, then, is the scrunch. That’s when my mind squeezes the unwanted emotion into a tiny ball so it will more easily fit down that oubliette.

There is definitely anger going on during the process. The anger comes from the act of defending myself from the emotion, like the emotion showed up at the front door and said “Deal with me!” and my mind screamed “NO!”, bashed it over the head, and through the body into the wood chipper.

Hey, remember Fargo? Great film.

And the thing is, this happens a lot.  The amount of things in my environment and my life that I actually can deal with like a functionally intact grownup is a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of life and absolutely everything else gets violently and vehemently shoved out of my mind by the force we will call The Bouncer.

Well, techincally, The Doorman. But The Bouncer is a cooler name.

And because I am a highly intelligent person and therefore have a very strong emotional suppression circuit, The Bouncer has plenty of muscle to use to keep all the bad thoughts and emotions out.

He is assisted in this by my vigorous program of distraction. As long as I keep my mind absorbed in something, the bad thoughts have no way of getting past my Bouncer and forcing me to deal with them and maybe even resolve them.

Why, it’s the percfect system!

Unless you want to have a life or by happy or anything like that.

Because the thing is, that Bouncer of mine doesn’t let the good stuff in either. Turns out that when you have depression, your Bouncer is set to reject absolutely everything except for a very smaller number of things that provide such a strong stimulus to the reward center of the brain that they are considered “safe”.

But it’s not enough. These strong reward stimuli get you through the day and help you cope, but for the most. part, you are starving to death due to lack of emotional nutrition.

Human being have a lot of highly complex needs (thanks, OBAMA) and these captured sources of reward can only fulfill a few of them. They are  (sometimes literally) junk food. They are packed with the calories we need to survive but lack all the other nutrients needed to be healthy.

Things like love, affection, acceptance, respect, dignity, a sense of belonging, a sense of community, sex, intimacy, a path for one’s ambitions, a sense of safety, a sense of competence, and of course, cookies from Mama.

And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. ^[1]

Back to the scrunch. I glibly called it compression for the oubliette, but the truth is, I don’t know exactly what is going on there. At least on the sruface, you would think you could go right to suppresion and, ya know, skip a step.

I think what the scrunch phase accomplishes is that it kills the energy of the emotion. Stops it in its tracks. Maybe roughs it up a little. It really is that primal rejection, that id based “NO!” that comes from the deepest and most primitive part of the mind.

That makes it self-directed anger. although subjectively, it doesn’t feel that way. But those negative emotions are as much a part of me as the Bouncer is, and so when he clubs my legit emotions into senselessness, it’s only me who he is hurting.

And to exit my metaphor for once, there are a lot of things that have to be dealt with, like it or not. You can’t ignore your “bills” forever. Sooner or later, you have to pay, and the more you delay, the more you pay.

Sadly, that means that dealing with your emotions and seeing them through is one of those things that only gets harder with time. It’s the classic crunch between the desire to avoid pain and your long term best interests.

And unlike in the real world, these “bills” cannot be paid by anyone but you. The only way to pay is to feel the damned feelings already and be rid of them, and that requires a certain kind of spiritual evolution.

You have to have evolved to the point where you can choose temporary pain for future reward. That sounds simply but it ain’t.

Modern society has become so immediate and convenient that even highly intelligent people (ahem) find it hard to consciously choose that which they know will hurt, even if they are one hundred percent sure it will be worth it.

But that’s a subject for another day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m rather pleased with how bad I feel right now.

Because I know what it is : the urge to act is rising in me. And for once in my life, I am not pushing it back down and making it obey me. I am, instead. letting it fester and grow until Something Happens.

Hopefully something good, but right now, I am not feeling too picky. I will take what comes as long as it catalyzes some positive change within me and doesn’t end with me being homeless or in jail.

Because I al really fucking sick of this stupid life of mine. I want… no, I need to escape it. And that means that clutch of fear that has been holding me back has got to GO. That feeling of queasy panic I get when I contemplate going eventhe tiniest bit out of my miniscule comfort zone can’t keep being the boss of me forever.

And my loathing for the insipid voice in my head that keeps insisting everything is fine grows more potently poisonous every day.

Because it’s not fine. I need to grow and spread my wings and leave this fouled and fetid nest of mine and go out there to find my flock.

Or at least a job I can competently perform and get paid for.

And no more tormenting myself with what I “could” be doing. I’m wise to that trick now. My depression turns “could” into “should” and then “should” becomes yet another reason to hate myself because there must be something horribly wrong with me – I must be the worst person in the world – if there are all these things I “could” be doing and all I do is play video games instead.

Fuck off and die, depression. I hate you so much.

It’s no mystery why I spend all day playing ESO. It’s because while I am doing so, I am happy, or at the very least fully occupied and therefore not subject to the million and one torments my mind inflicts on me when it has spare CPU cycles to work with.

So I play ESO all day because it is a way for me to feel safe. I am safe from my inner demons as long as I keep my mind full of stimulation and distraction.

A therapist, hearing this, would no doubt consider themselves quite clever when they said that the solution is obviously to find a way for me to feel safe outside of my distractions and stimulations.

Well DUH. But I don’t see that happening any time soon. Not until I am strong enough to murder my fears and thus face facing the world in realtime HD for once.

I am working a different angle right now. I am trying the “energy absorbing villain” strategy from so many episodes of my childhood faves.

That’s where the hero or heroes realize that they can’t beat the energy absorbing villain the usual way because no matter how they attack he/she/it, they just absorb the energy from it then laugh cruelly.

So they switch tactics and start pouring all available energy into the villain and that overloads the villain’s ability to absorb and/or contain the energy, and they go bing and the heroes pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Well, depression’s my energy sucking villain, and I fully intend to pour more life energy into it than it can absorb, and overload it Blast it to pieces if I can. I have handed my id a blank cheque to gather all the energy it can from the world and from all that suppressed energy inside me and use it to blast that mass of pain and fear and other such bullshit that has been holding me back into teeny tiny pieces.

I might not be exactly the same person when all is said and done. This process is going to produce a new kind of consciousnss in me and that generally shifts identity along with it, or at least personality.

I am fine with that. It’s not like being exactly who I am right now is working out great for me anyhow. I’m over worrying that I will become some kind of terrible person. That was always just a ghost puppet my depression used to scare me away from overcoming it.

I have enough faith in who I truly am to see through such petty bullshit now. I know that I am a very nice fellow right down to my emotional core and that is not going to change no matter how shaken up my identity gets.

I just love being nice way too much!

But even if I did have to become somewhat of a dick in order to be free, it’s a price I am willing to pay.

Because when it really comes down to it, I would rather be a happy asshole than a miserable nice guy.

I have a lot of assertion of self to do. I need to set my limits and I can’t guarantee this will be done in a gentle and considerate way. Like any (much delayed) adolescent, I am figuring things out as I go as I deal with powerful and previously untapped forces within me, and total self control is not my highest priority right now.

Self realization is.

So go ahead, depression. Make me feel terrible. Make me scared of the world. Make me feel like there is no point to anything and that everything is too hard.

I eat that shit for breakfast now. And turn it into the fuel I need to fight you. I am learning to recycle, bitch, and that means all this stored up emotion is being turned into the ammunition I will use to slay you.

So burn, bitch, BURN. I will roast you out of me like I am sweating out a fever if that is what it takes. I will suffer the fires of hell if that’s what it takes. I will tear out my guts and stomp on them if that is what it takes.

In short, I will do whatever it takes to get rid of you.

So pack your fucking bags. You’re on the way OUT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

The question is what to do with that information.

It’s all well and good to stand atop a rugged ediface of Western thought and say “Then you should question everything!” but that’s a very hard thing to put into practice.

Because we need to act. Even those of us with depression. We need to act on our perceptions of the world and it doesn’t matter how suspect those perceptions are because they are all we have to go on.

So yeah. I know that my depression makes me interpret reality in some very crazy ways that make no sense if subjects to even cursory logical scrutiny.

But that’s not enough.  Not enough to change what I believe – what I feel to be true.

And until belief changes, my reality remains the same.

On a good day, I can examine one of my delusions and feel the untruth of it, and on a very good day I can hold on to that feeling of falsity long enough for it to drive some of the bad belief out of my system.

Thus, progress is made.

But it’s just not possible to doubt everything all the time. The mere thought of it exausts me. The last thing I need is more mental bureaucracy.

What I wouldn’t give for ten minutes alone with the org chart of my brain. By the time I was done it would be half the size and SO much more efficient.

Surely, though, (Hi Shirley!)) there is no need to doubt everything. Depression doesn’t distort every single perception. It’s not psychosis.

So perhaps it would be helpful to narrow things down a tad.

What depression distorts is emotional perceptions. It creates emotional delusions about what people think of us, how they feel about us, what our status in society is, and pretty much every other emotional evaluation of which we are capable.

And we are emotional creatures, us humans. No matter how logical we might think we are, it is always emotion that is calling the shots and logic that serves to execute them.

For the most part, we feel our way through life.

So emotional delusions, while not as colorful or spectacular as the sensory kind, can have enormous long term implications for the individual with depression.

I often visualize my depression is being like an intense magnetic field that draws everything in my mind towards the negative. But because its pull is universal , constant, and even, it’s easy to lose sight of it and forget its there, like being in a fast moving airplane with no windows.

Sure, you can kind of feel the motion if you think of it. but for the most part the room could be completely stationary as far as you know.

Okay, so that analogy needs work.

My point is that depression’s distortions fade into the background most of the time, which is why it is so easy for the individual depression to conclude that how they feel about the world is how the world actually is, no matter how crazy that would seem to a theoretical outside observer.

I have only developing my own ability to tell the difference in the last month or two. And I would love to be able to simply impart that knowledge to my fellow depression sufferers and help them on their journey, but it is not quite that simple.

I know better than most that the wisest words in the world don’t help at all if you are not in the right place to hear them.

The jounrye out of the darkness is a long one and there is no way of knowing when you wil, at long last, l emerge into the light.

All you can do is keep moving in the direction of the light, and take the increasing warmth and understanding as your inspiration to continue.

My sleep’s been weird lately. Weirder than usual, that is.

I think I must have gotten way, way behind on my REM sleep because I was starting to get these periods where I found it very hard to think.

It was like my mind was full of some thick, heavy fluid that resisted all action. I honestly wonder if I accidentally experienced what it would be like to have a lower IQ.  The usual high arcing electrical charge of my megnificent mind was absent and the best that I could hope for was to muddle through somehow.

It happened before and during FRED last night. That made life a lot more stressful than it really needed to me. I spent a lot of the time fairly bummed out because I just don’t know how to cope with life in that state.

Luckily, it cleared up some and I was able to enjoy myself more once I had eaten and had some time for the ol’ vaccuum tubes to warm up.

But it frightened me. I worried that I was having some kind of stroke and that I was going to end up with a fucked up brain that was bot even good for the few things I manage to get done any more.

It would be the ultimate cruelty for me to lose all this mental might right when I am on the verge of being able to make use of it.

And while that it is still possible, I am thinking sleep had a lot more to do with it. I managed to get some good sleep this afternoon and felt a million times better for it. And I am giving myself permission to sleep as much as I need to from now on – to gorge myself at an all you can sleep buffet, if that’s what it takes – until I catch up on the backlog ad can walk around feeling human again.

Because seriously. What all do I need to be awake for anyhow? Making “progress” in ESO? Like that means anything.

I wonder what I would do with my time if I couldn’t play video games.

I might actually be productive.

What a terrifying thought!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.